UNITED KINGDOM & IRELAND SPOTLIGHT
Solid Ground
As the scale of the Huntsman project demonstrates, there's nothing mini about the recent corporate investment portfolio of the U.K. and Ireland ... unless you're counting BMW's February 2005 announcement of a US$188-million, 200-job investment in its Mini plant in Oxford. The region's flexibility stands out even more against a backdrop of a larger European Union wrestling with new members and new rules and regulations. Behind it stands a university infrastructure that is achieving renown among corporations comparable to its reputation among scholars. And European demographics don't hurt either.
Research published in April 2005 by the European Commission raised the specter of both a decline and an aging in the European population overall. But the outlook for the U.K. and Ireland was considerably brighter.
Near term, the Irish population is projected to increase by 500,000 over the next 10 years (to 4.5 million), while in the U.K. the increase will be by more than 2 million people (to nearly 62 million). That decade figures to be crucial to both territories' next 45 years. In the long-term projections stretching to 2050, Ireland is expected to be among the few in Europe to have a positive population growth, on the order of 36 percent, or 1.5 million total. The U.K., meanwhile, is projected to increase its population by 4.7 million in that time period.
Higher education connectivity with business is also on the upswing. The results of the government's Higher Education-Business and Community Interaction Survey 2002-03, released in February 2005, showed 89 percent of the 164 institutions responding now have a single inquiry point for business. In addition, patent applications were up by 26 percent, business consultancy income was up 38 percent, and universities were creating one spin-off firm for every $32 million of research expenditure, compared with every $113 million in the U.S.
"This fourth year-on-year increase in knowledge transfer shows that the Government is delivering on its vision to see more products invented, developed and made in Britain," said the U.K.'s Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury.
Keep It Moving
BMW's investment, as well as those by Ford in Dagenham ($318 million) and Nissan in Sunderland ($420 million), show transportation to be at the core of new investments and programs. Only much of it is now oriented more toward aerospace than automotive.
Indeed, figures released by the U.K. Dept. of Trade and Industry (DTI) showed that the nation trailed only the U.S. in the amount of R&D investment it had recently attracted in both the aerospace and pharmaceutical sectors.
In February 2005, U.K. Industry Minister Jacqui Smith opened a $22.6-million materials research center, significantly based at the Airbus UK complex in Filton. It is one of several regional centers set to focus on composites research for aerospace and marine end uses, all part of the National Composites Network jointly funded by the government and by private industry. In this center's case, approximately $13 million was provided by Airbus UK. That's the least it could do, since approximately 400 U.K. companies and 21,000 workers have helped develop the Trent 900 engines on Airbus' enormous A380 aircraft. That engine alone saw investment of more than $997 million from the U.K. government and more than $470 million from Rolls-Royce.
The stakes get even bigger in the public-private alliance. In January 2005, the U.K. Ministry of Defense named Airtanker Ltd — a consortium composed of Airbus parent EADS, Rolls-Royce, U.K. aerospace giant Cobham, VT Group and the U.K. division of French firm Thales — as its preferred bidder on a 27-year, $24-billion contract to supply re-fueling aircraft to the Royal Air Force. The wings for the aircraft are made at an Airbus plant in Broughton, North Wales. That same month, Gordon Page, chairman of Cobham, was named the new chairman of the government's Industrial Development Advisory Board.
